Stage veterans Lily Tomlin and Gabriel Byrne will be employed by HBO this coming season as the cable network picks up two shows starring the actors, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Tomlin — who starred in the Broadway solos The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (by Jane Wagner) and Appearing Nightly (by her and partner Wagner) — will headline the new one-hour comedy "12 Miles of Bad Road" from "Designing Women" creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason.

The actress will play the "matriarch of a wealthy Texas family whose real estate business and absurd wealth complicate the simplest family matters," as the trade mag reports. Michael Engler directed the pilot, which also features Gary Cole, Mary Kay Place, Katherine LaNasa, Kim Dickens, Eliza Coupe, Leslie Jordan, Ivana Milicevic, David Andrews, Sean Bridgers, Texas Battle and Cameron Richardson.

Byrne — seen on Broadway in Eugene O'Neill dramas A Touch of the Poet and A Moon for the Misbegotten as well as Off-Broadway in The Exonerated — will star in the half-hour drama "In Treatment" from "Entourage" creators Mark Wahlberg and Stephen Levinson.

In the work based on a popular Israeli series of the same name, Byrne will play a therapist "who is calm, smooth, insightful and non-confrontational with his patients but turns into a testy, self-doubting individual full of barely concealed anger when he is a patient seeing his own shrink." HBO picked up the show for five episodes during the pilot stage and has since ordered 40 more.